Miéville: No. I kept wanting to find out what the giant polar bear was. When I discovered it was, indeed, a giant polar bear, I was deflated. I found it fairly page-turny, but I found it much too long, too bogged down with its historical research for its narrative, its disclosures and teratological money-shots too contingent to its narrative, and its embedded politics–particularly vis-à-vis homosexuality–offensive.

VanderMeer: You don’t believe those embedded politics were part of the historical research?

Miéville: No, because I’m not talking about the politics of the characters, but about the politics of the text, as I read it.

VanderMeer: At least he was honest. In that sense.

Miéville: Specifically, the obsessive locus of the evil character’s evil in the fact that he was an engager in anal sex. I know lots of people point to the fact that there’s a “sympathetic” gay character too (who reads, incidentally, to me, very like someone invented because an editor said “we really need a counterbalance to the evil gay”) but that character is explicitly defined as a goody because he doesn’t have sex on the ship. That’s nothing to do with historical research or attitudes (and parenthetically the idea that in a crew that size two men only would be fucking is ludicrous) but to do with the text’s pathological Terror of anal penetration which is (spoiler!–hello The Sparrow) the usual way culture gets to have a deep-seated pathologising of gay sexuality alongside putatively liberal attitudes to desexualised gay men.

VanderMeer: You’ve just ruined the innocence of perhaps 85% of Weird Tales readers.

Miéville: Hurrah! My work here is done.

VanderMeer: Please take a bow. I really liked the book, but I didn’t catch the subtext you’re talking about, in part, probably, because I was turning pages too quickly.

Miéville: I’m very aware, by the way, that loads of readers of this may think I’m being a humourless or po-faced dick about it. This is how it reads to me, and I have a big problem with it. And I think arguments about “what the writer really means” or thinks are very point-missing, because this stuff isn’t reducible to “intent.”
(Hervorhebungen von mir)